Researching and Searching

If you are a regular reader, you know that I’m currently writing a book.

I’m supposed to be writing a book, however, I’m up to my eyeballs in the research stage despite having years of personal experience on the topic.

I have been reading book after book about twice-exceptional learners, gifted learners, learning styles, and all those students that have been previously considered difficult, lazy, unmotivated and persnickety.

My TBP has been described using all those adjectives and many others. If I’m being honest, I have described previous students using these words…until I knew better.

While I am scouring websites, articles and books, I can’t help but think of my own son. I think that’s good actually as I hope to create a very readable and user-friendly guide for parents and educators.

Today, my own beliefs and experiences about the importance of finding interests and passions for 2e children were confirmed in my reading.

I know it’s important, but what if your kid is struggling to find that strong pull toward a particular subject or activity?

Mine is temporarily interested with something until he feels as though he has gotten out of it all that he can. This has been true of piano, drawing, Harry Potter, Star Wars and I believe that we are on the cusp of saying goodbye to Legos (currently, he is talking about selling his bricks at our upcoming neighborhood garage sale).

Video games continue to be a daily interest and he enjoys making zombie movies with his flip camera. The perfectionism in him sabotages his interest because his final products “don’t look the way that I want them to” or “are lame compared to the ones I watch on YouTube.”

We are looking for experts to serve as mentors, but it’s been hard.

He is interested in animating, but we are still trying to find the right software and materials. Lego animating was a long and tedious procedure which was only embraced for a short time.

According to my research, parents should constantly expose kids like mine to lots of experiences and maybe one of them will stick.

Selfishly, I hope he finds a passion for cooking. That would be delicious!

8 thoughts on “Researching and Searching”

Ugh – research is the worst part of writing a book. Of course, the writing and the editing are the worst parts, too. Actually, it’s all pretty painful. But so rewarding! And I can’t wait to see your progress. Here’s hoping something special clicks for your son soon – that will make EVERYTHING seem much better, I’m sure!`

Oh no, not the legos! Those things are more expensive than gold, it seems. (Ours are all 2nd hand because I can’t stomach new.)

Hmmm…. animating. It seems like I’ve seen some things out there… have you looked at the Adobe Creative Cloud? (https://creative.adobe.com/products/animate) It’s subscription based so it’s month to month (in other words, not a huge upfront fee) but there is a huge learning curve on that kind of software. There’s usually adult education classes for things like this though – I’m not sure what you want to spend.

I did a search on “open source animation software and came up with these:

(This comment is probably going to get spammed because of all these links. Eish.)

A mentor would be awesome, of course, but what I’ve found is that even classes leave something to be desired. Starting out by picking a small task and finding youtube tutorials is what has worked best for me with things like Photoshop and InDesign.

Hey, I’m not sure if my last comment on this post made it out of your spam filter or not, I had a lot of links in there with animation stuff so I think it got caught. Just wanted to let you know it’s hanging out somewhere!